Lifer. It is a word, Phil Bingham admits, that brings to mind spending 30 years behind bars. “It is interminable. It never ends and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” he says.

Bingham, a 39-year-old who describes himself as a "one-paced cyclist", is describing his experience last summer as an amateur riding every stage of the Tour de France route. He gained the dubious-sounding title of 'lifer' while competing in the annual charity event, the Tour de Force.

Such has been the event’s popularity that all 41 lifer places were snapped up inside 14 minutes for 2014. Bingham had already clocked over 10,000km cycling the Americas, but he admits that the French odyssey was “a big undertaking”.

“You make mental adjustments as you go on. You have to break it down into stages and if you start thinking too far ahead about Mont Ventoux in week one, when you are still pottering around in northern France, it will be too much to process. It is a voyage of discovery.”

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The Tour de Force, which rides out a week before cycling’s three-week extravaganza, was set up by the family of William Wates, who was tragically killed in Honduras in the Nineties. It was initially conceived as a family and friends' event, the exclusivity yielding an emotional bond of togetherness in memory of a teenager who died just a few months away from starting university.

The Wates family have now opened it up to a wider audience and over £1 million has been raised for inner-city projects to date. It is a thoroughly well-run event. Research on the course starts shortly after the Tour route is announced. Once there, your focus is on survival, not paper work for your next hotel check-in.

“It is about pretending to be a professional when you are very definitely an amateur who can just about get through it,” admits Bingham. “There are parallels and one of the things we learnt was what it must be like to be a junior domestique. It became clear that for a 23-year-old work horse domestique, life is incredibly tough - and boring, I‘d imagine - for huge chunks of the race.”

However, one of the differences between the professional and the amateur is that the former get a recuperative lie-in every day, before their late morning starts. The Tour de Force, on the other hand, starts at 7:30 every morning “come what may”.

“By the time you get in, the whole field hospital has been laid out with bodies and bikes,” says Bingham, who runs VeloVixen, a leading women’s cycling retailer.

“The mechanics are there, the physios are dealing with sore bodies, and extra lunch is being gorged on. It is a proper circus and it is the same a week later for the pros, albeit in a bigger way.”

Although there is a huge amount of support for the riders, the emphasis is on being self-sufficient. “Organising yourself is one of the biggest challenges thanks to the logistics of it all. Have I got the right nutrition, my gloves, my hat, have I tightened that loose bolt?’

These everyday scenarios also came against the backdrop of one of the tour dangers: lack of sleep. Bingham admits it was his “biggest hurdle”.

At certain points during the route, there are 90-minute transfers to the next stage, which means a gulped-down breakfast at 5am. On another day, there might be a briefing on the following day’s stage at 10pm. “Then you have to wash your kit, see to your bike and mentally try and wind down,” says Bingham, who survived on an average of four hours’ sleep throughout.

Last year witnessed the 100th anniversary of Le Tour. For the charity riders, the emotional tag was enhanced by the romantic notion of completing the whole route in the same time frame as the professionals. As Bingham admits, “it is one you can take to your grave”.

Moreover, Bingham even proclaims that there is a spiritual side to the tour. “If you ask any of those who finished as lifers, I would be surprised if anyone didn’t say Mont Ventoux was in some way special. It was like a spectre waiting for us for two weeks.

“There had been a lot of talk about it. By the time the stage came around, accumulative exhaustion had kicked in. It was a hot day and we had ridden 220kms before the start of the climb.

“An almost biblical thunderstorm arrived and I did feel something unusual happen to me that day. I have never ridden a bike that well. I had done it in the L’Étape three years before and it had nearly broken me over three hours.

“This time I did it in 1 hour 44 minutes. There were those who broke down at the top and those who were on such a high that they couldn’t wipe the smile off their faces, like me. It had a huge effect on people.”

The Queen stage, Gap to Alpe d’Huez, was another indelible memory. One of Bingham’s co-riders was a fellow lifer whose brother was meant to be competing the event with him. He had died in training earlier that year. The two ventured up a valley doused in sunlight on the last climb. It was Bingham’s turn to cry.

“There were tears as we were so lucky to be doing this," he recalls. "It was overwhelming and I thought ‘we’ve done all this and aren’t we fortunate’.”

Now Bingham is coming back for more at the end of the month. He is competing the three UK stages of the Tour, but motivation has been lacking. “I’ve only completed three training rides”, he says, due to business commitments. Somehow you feel he will pull through.

My High

Weirdly, each 'hors categorie' climb. I loved each one, which I shouldn't have, given that I'm 6' 6". But it proved to me how much you learn about yourself in an event like the Tour de Force.

My Low

Being dropped on a climb by a cyclist 30 years my senior when we rode with a local club on one hot stage in the South of France. As Neil Kemp, a Glaswegian fellow lifer, said early on: 'In cycling, however good you are, you're still s****!'